Chi Mei ultra-slim display

This is the ultra-slim 13.3in WXGA laptop display from Chi Mei Optoelectronics, which makes the display for the Apple Air. With a glass front polished to 0.3mm and a 0.8 mm back-lit LCD panel, it weighs in at a scant 219 grams and produces a bright and crisp image when viewed from the side or even outdoors.

SSDs

These are solid-state drives and they're all over the place at Computex. Instead of a disc inside like most drives today, these are packed with flash memory chips. Advantages: They dish up data fast and you can drop them (allegedly) without them breaking. Disadvantages: the prices, but they're coming down.

Wall PC

These PCs from JSP-Tech Enterprise look a bit like a giant iPods and come in a range of bright colours. It's designed to hang on the wall in the living room or kitchen, or in a cafe or other public place. Based on Via's Mini-ITX motherboard, it can be used to serve up music and video or to surf the Web with a wireless keyboard. It comes with or without a small screen on the front and can also be hooked up to a TV or computer monitor. Pricing wasn't available.

Eee Monitor: Our former colleague, Dally Allen, who is now at US PC World, managed to snap these exclusive pics at the ASUS seminar in Taipei's Grand Hotel. While the specs of this unit are still a little sketchy (rumours suggest it will have a 19 to 21in screen) it looks to be a product along the same lines as Sony's 'panel PC'.

Acme's three-screen PC

Acme Portable, based near LA, sells these three-screen computers to production companies for video editing in the field, and to the military for flight simulators. Behind the 17in SXGA LCDs there's an Intel-based computer in a sturdy metal box, with 3 hot-swappable drives and seven expansion slots. It retails for about $US10,000 and weighs a chunky 22kg. "We originally designed it for gamers but the price was a bit out of their league", said VP of sales Jimmy Chang.

Dialogue Flybook

Dialogue Technology is back with an update to its Flybook, which lets you watch a DVD on a plane when the person in front of you drops their seat back. This latest version has a 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and Centrino WiFi chipset and up to 4G bytes of main memory. It can play video for five hours with an extended battery and retails for about $US2400.

Vinpoint disc copier

For the budding software pirate, err.. publisher: These SharkCopiers from Vinpower Digital copy up to 14 CDs, DVDs or Blu-ray Discs at a time and you can daisy-chain them for synchronised mass copying. Flip the disk and a built-in laser will etch a label on the other side. They write to disc at between 8x and 48x depending on the media type. Retail price is around $US1500.

Acrosser embedded PC

If you need a computer that keeps running when you cover it in dust and shake it around for months on end, look no further. This is Acrosser's Ares fanless industrial embedded computer, designed to be jammed into the back of a bus or train and then forgotten. You can't see from the picture but this one was being shaken vigorously for hours. It's part of the testing process designed to expose any latent defects in each product. The survivors are shipped out the door.

Ares CG6150

Believe it or not, this beast won a design award. It's fashioned after a suit of armour and its maker, Asustek, says it "exudes gamer chic". It has enough high-end components to make a serious gamers squeal, including four Intel Core 2 Extreme CPUs, four NVIDIA graphics chips, 8G bytes of DDR3 memory, four terabytes of storage, and enough liquid cooling gear (hopefully) to stop it from self-combusting. It's called the Ares CG6150.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix

This may be the first computer seen running Ubuntu's Netbook Remix, a new version of the open-source OS designed for mini-laptops like the Eee PC. It's seen here on an Amtek tablet computer with a 10.2-inch display and Intel's new Diamondville Atom processor. Amtek is a contract manufacturer serving mostly Japan, but also Tulip Computers in Europe. The device has a touch-screen and is for use in restaurants and other work settings, but Amtek will also make Ubuntu mini-notebooks for consumers that should be on sale in a few months.

Computex show girls

The show floors are often packed with scantily clad girls to help draw in the mostly male buyers. Many are very nice and very smart; we met one who's studying for her MBA. And please, call them showgirls: they really aren't very partial to being called 'booth babes'.

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